The Brightest Bulb

Imagine, for a moment, a world without garlic: garlic-free garlic
bread, tzatziki sans Allium sativum, a chili crisp defanged. If
this sounds like the makings of a horror story to you, you’re not
alone. Garlic consumption in the U.S. has quadrupled since 1980,
and people around the world have been enjoying the stuff for
thousands of years. But alliums smell like sulfur, and sulfur is
something humans are born *not* liking—so why did we start adding
garlic, onions, and their kin to our food? This episode, we join
microbiologist Rob Dunn and food safety specialist Ben Chapman to
follow along as they conduct the world's first experiment designed
to figure out whether alliums started out as a food safety additive
designed to keep our lamb stew safe for longer, and only later
turned into a flavor we crave. Plus, why did the British government
send garlic to the trenches in WWI? What do fetal sniffing,
Egyptian fertility tests, Korean mythology, and the world’s
first-recorded labor strike have to do with the stinking rose?
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